BTW, if anyone doesn’t know, but wants to know the point behind the fish, it’s supposedly an acrostic that produces the greek word for “Fish”: Ichthys (ἸΧΘΥΣ), composed of the words " Ἰησοῦς Χρῑστός Θεοῦ Υἱός Σωτήρ", transliterated “Iesous CHristos, THeou (h)Yios, Soter”, meaning “Jesus the anointed, son of god, saviour”.

Early christians used the symbol to mark meeting places and the like when they were being prosecuted by the Romans.

Medieval people: Prohibit Christians from making business with money because that’s a sin

Medieval people: Create an economy where moneylending is lucrative

Medieval people: Begin to exclude Jews from other lines of work

Medieval people: Why are the Jews making their profit with moneylending?

This guy: Jews are enriching themselves from wars they never chose by providing a service that only they could to kings that started wars they needed that service for.

On the contrary, I am quite ideologically sympathetic. I’ve always used Open / LibreOffice, I no longer use windows, never had a Mac or iPhone or anything, I argued with stakeholders for making our university project FOSS rather than proprietary, the list goes on. I’ve spent enough time arguing with people why they should care about FOSS.

I’m just also aware of my biases, and of the fact that most people are heavily biased by their UX. Most people don’t want to spend a long time thinking to understand, they simply want to use. And in that respect, bad==proprietary doesn’t universally hold up. Big companies can spend big bucks on user research, on figuring out what does and doesn’t work for their target audience, on developing features that appeal to people. They also can spend big bucks on marketing and cultivating a brand image so that people start to identify with their products, deepening the attachment.

There is also an unfortunate side effect of FOSS when it comes to setting technical standards: If everyone can make their own, plenty of people will do that. Sure, many things have since been standardised, but how often has a common standard evolved as a side effect of some big corporation(s) adopting or outright developing it?

I don’t need to preach to you about all the ways this sucks. The unfortunate pragmatic truth is that proprietary software is a poisoned, but quite appealing apple. The most common answer I got about FOSS is “yeah, it sounds great, but I don’t care, I just want something that works for me.”

Even if their proprietary system of choice got so bad to use that they’d switch to an open one, that doesn’t mean they’d embrace the ideology. It just means that specific system does what they need it to. If iOS becomes unbearable, they may switch to Android, or perhaps to Windows phones, but they’re still gonna install and use apps that feel good to use, regardless of whether they’re FOSS.

The fight against proprietary software isn’t going to be won on ideological grounds. I feel like some developers and advocates of FOSS miss that fact. If you want to be solid competition, worry about being a viable alternative first. Once people start to use a system that allows them to customise more, they may get intrigued by that liberty and become susceptible to the ideology behind, but unless they enjoy using it already, they’ll never engage with it deeply enough.

If we divide, we’ll be conquered. That wisom is at least two thousand years old by now. Better to unite and defy.

I’m aware why iOS is bad, thank you. I still don’t wish restrictions on its users. That’s just not a nice thing to do.

There’s also the argument of lasting improvement: If people switch to other systems, I’d rather see them do it out of a positive motivation (i.e. “this is better”) than a negative one (i.e. “the other one so bad I had to finally jump ship and find a different solution”).

That motivation will bias your mindset, and a positive mindset will lead to a better user experience. If they just switch because it’s not as bad as the other, that will taint their experience. They’ll be inclined to think about what they miss, rather than what the other offers.

Example: Me, trying to wrap my head around the communities thing here after leaving reddit. I miss the relative simplicity of finding topical subreddits, which is harder here both because there’s less traffic overall, and because I had a sizeable collection of subs there that I can’t simply migrate here. Part of me wants to return to the familiar hell, even if I rationally understand why it’s shit, and I feel that sours my experience with Lemmy so far.

Humans tend to prefer the familiar, so if they leave iOS for something better, I want that better thing to land as well as possible, to encourage getting familiar with the new environment and expand their horizons, and to make future leaps in other areas less scary and off-putting.

If they gave people more choices, it would be less of a shity ecosystem though, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t that be a good thing? It wouldn’t fix any of the other issues, but less freedom is never something to be glad about.

I hate apple as much as the next guy, but that doesn’t mean I have to hate their users or wish them ill. We should strive to stand above the petty us-vs-them mindset.